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October 21 - October 27, 2021
As the adult of Stage (3), and falsely self-conscious, you went on aiming your arrows of attention at that insubstantial some-body, at that human appearance of yours which daily became more substantial for you, and soon was your identity card, your identity itself.
as the seer of Stages (4) and (5), you are again truly Self-conscious: but this time you penetrate that ring of appearances more deliberately and consistently,
You are becoming adept at two-way looking - at once looking in at No-thing and out at every-thing.
Zen isn’t interested in the many aspects and strata of the mind but in penetrating to its core, “for it holds that once this core is grasped, all else will become relatively insignificant and crystal clear.”
nevertheless our radical answer to psychological problems (as to all the rest) is two-way attention - simultaneously looking in at this absolutely stainless and pollution-free and unproblematical Nothingness and out at whatever murky problems it’s presenting.
We have to go on to discover much more about the meaning of headlessness, its value for living, its drastic implications for our thinking, our behaviour and relationships, our role in society.
headlessness is for living always, for sharing occasionally, for arguing about never.
Shut your eyes, and for ten seconds check whether you now have the slightest evidence of a headpiece occupying the centre of your world, of a some-thing here that has any discernable boundaries or shape or size or colour or opacity - let alone eyes or nose or ears or mouth. (Aches and tickles and tastes and so on don’t begin to make up a head, aren’t like that at all.) Or, for that matter, have you the slightest evidence right now of a body?
Similarly our thoughts and feelings appear only on the blank screen here which Zen calls No-mind, and leave no trace on it as they disappear.
it’s your face there presented to my absence-of-face here - face to no-face
In appearance I’m a thing moving about in Space. In reality I’m that unmoving Space Itself. Walking across the room, I look down, and my head (no-head) is the infinite and empty Stillness in which those arms and legs are flailing. Driving my car, I look out, and my human body (no-body) is this same Stillness, in which the whole countryside is being shuffled like a giant’s pack of cards.
All his agitation is illusory. He neither needs nor can do anything to calm down - except stop overlooking the place where he is forever at rest, where the Peace that passes all understanding is so brilliantly self-evident. This yearned-for tranquility, which he imagined was always evading him, is discovered at his very centre, begging to be noticed!
How is it, then, that I still go on seeing everything - beginning with these hands and ending with that blue sky - as out there instead of here? Or, strangely, as both at once?
whatever I’m doing - from washing the dishes to driving my car to thinking about this paragraph - I find myself doing it worse while I’m imagining a headed somebody right here doing it, and better while I’m seeing him off.
It is ceasing to take everything and anything for granted. It is the re-discovery of the obvious as very strange, the given as wonderful and precious, before we bend it to our purposes.
It is hearing, seeing, smelling, touching things as if for the first time, relieved of the crushing load of time past. It is the revitalizing and extension of our childhood astonishment.
“The self in its first purgation has cleansed the mirror of perception; hence, in its illumined life, has seen Reality ... Now, it has got to be Reality: a very different thing.
In a certain sense, this is the real start of the Way, of the true spiritual life, which is nothing else than self-surrender, self-abandonment, actually underwriting whatever happens to one, dying as the separate and illusory ego (I am a somebody) and being reborn as the one and truly egoless Ego (I AM).
How is this breakthrough actually made? What can one do to bring it nearer? In a sense, nothing. It’s not a doing, but an undoing, a giving up, an abandonment of the false belief that there’s anyone here to abandon.
whenever we have the grace to say YES! to our circumstances, and actively to will (rather than passively to acquiesce in) whatever happens, why then there springs up that real and lasting joy which Eastern tradition calls ananda.
quotation from one of the Buddha’s sermons: “Nirvana is visible in this life, inviting, attractive, accessible to the wise disciple.” What exactly is this so-visible Nirvana? In the same sermon it is described as “the Peace, the Highest ... the end of craving, the turning away from desire.”
total self-loss is total self-fulfillment.
The present moment holds infinite riches beyond your wildest dreams.”
seeing quite simply (with a wise and blessed naivety) that here we have no head, no thing at all. What a long way we travel to find the treasure of treasures we carry with us all the time!
Having said which, we must hasten to repeat that, by itself and when not followed up by sustained practice and deep understanding, plus (above and below all) by surrender of the separative personal will, our initial experience of headlessness is as yet unavailing.
What we are can be trusted to reveal Itself in all its noonday freshness and warmth and brilliance, its blazing obviousness, exactly when It should.
The truth is that the Headless Way isn’t a way after all, a means of getting somewhere. Everything one’s heart could possibly desire is freely given from the very start. This makes it strikingly different from those disciplines and courses which come in progressive installments, with the real goods to be delivered some day: and meanwhile there has to be this Institution to lay down the rules and administer the whole business.
All the same - and descending now to the level where others do exist - the difficulty of keeping up this seeing by oneself, of going it alone, can scarcely be exaggerated.
